Karsten on Free Software

Finally, a music sort-of-major has noticed that suing your customers might not be the most effective form of marketing. As El Reg reports, the Canadian label Nettwerk, which manages Avril Lavigne and Dido, is intervening in a case where the RIAA is suing a family over alledgedly illegal downloads of music.

The privately-owned Nettwerk Music Group is intervening, it says, because the songs downloaded by the Gruebel family include Avril Lavigne, a Nettwerk management client. Nettwerk will fund the Gruebel’s defense. “The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists’ best interests,” said Nettwerk chief executive Terry McBride in a statement. “Litigation is not ‘artist development’. Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love.”

It seems that there are some intelligent and forward-thinking people left in the music business. Kudos to them.

With Google reluctant to help its country out by handing over user’s search records, other people understand better what the obligations of a citizen of the United States of America are.

On Patriot Search, you can be sure that your search information is reliably transmitted to the government. Thanks to their Search Syntax, you can even make sure that the information is transmitted extra fast, eg. if you prefix your search with “terrorist:true”. Please dump unpatriotic Google and use Patriot Search instead.

(I have been wondering for some time why a country where people are so busy being afraid of so many things still keeps in its national anthem the line “…and the home of the brave”.)

Thanks, Gareth!

As discussion rages around search engine records going to US courts (“Would you please hand over the data for all searches containing the letters ‘p’, ‘o’, ‘r’ and ‘n’ ?”), someone has designed a Google 2.0 screenshot. Nice.

via netzpolitik.org

Another day, another ruling: A Nevada Court has decided that Google’s practice of caching websites is legal. While not that embattled to boot, this clears one of several questions concerning standard search engine practices. The EFF is happy.

Me too. If Google’s cache had been declared illegal, what would have been next? My computer’s RAM, which also copies every document I look at?

The copyright arms race has reached new heights: The Vatican has chosen to enforce its copyright to the words and writings of the pope. While I still marvel at the idiocy of this, the Holy See is quick to clarify that this is not about money, but about censorship:

Vatican officials explain that their goal is not to limit access to the Pope’s words, but to prevent “premature” publication of leaked documents, and to guard against exploitation of the Pope’s name.

Meanwhile, a group not renowned for an excessively critical attitude towards the catholic church is starting to have its doubts:

The Union of Italian Catholic Publishers and Booksellers said that it had not been consulted, and that the edict “flies in the face of what we do — spreading the Pope’s message to the world”.

The copyright claims are retroactive for the past 50 years. So if you plan on criticising the church, get a lawyer to be sure you stay within the Fair Use limits of your country. Otherwise: If you don’t shut up and kneel while receiving papal (or was that PayPal) indoctrination, then help you God™

Things are starting to move again at WIPO.. With the first meeting of a Development Agenda Committee due at the end of February (I have my plane tickets already), Chile has submitted an interesting proposal (.pdf).

Core points are:

Proposal 1: Appraisal of the public domain Proposal 2: Importance of complementary systems to and in intellectual property Proposal 3: Study for assessing what are the appropriate levels of intellectual property, considering the particular situation in each country, specifically its degree of development and institutional capacity

And Free Software is in there, too:

[…] it should be considered that the specific intellectual property system enables creators and innovators, and also rightsholders in general, to implement various models for the dissemination or exploitation of creations or innovations, such as open licensing systems. Within such creations or innovations, the expansion of free software and other open licenses such as Creative Commons suggests the need to identify, study and disseminate the licensing options which co-exist within the intellectual property system.

Dragging its feet as usual, Microsoft has taken the next step in the European monopoly lawsuit. The company has promised to let other people look at its server source code to appease the European Commission, which has already slapped Microsoft with a hefty fine.

So what’s the problem? There are several. For one, noone ever asked Microsoft to do this. Nobody in this case wants their server source code. What is needed to enable competition in the marketplace are the server protocols. What’s the difference? If the source code is the blueprint for the wiring of the Windows server, the protocols are just the design specifications for the plug that goes into it. Microsoft is simply not offering what is has been asked for.

Another problem is that this source code is, in effect, poisonous. Any software developer who looks at this code – which is of course copyrighted by Microsoft – and then goes on to develop something similar to the Windows server, will immediately be sued for copyright infringement. Even if she writes something completely different, simply being sued by Microsoft is enough to destroy a person’s economic existence.

Microsoft is trying to fool the European Commission. FSF Europe, which represents the Samba Team that developes a rival Free Software server, has debunked Microsoft’s claim to compliance, and several international papers have taken note. Let’s hope the Commission does as well. Isn’t it surprising that the world’s biggest software company should have such trouble telling apart source code and protocols?

Another rights hoarder is about to shoot itself in the foot. As CNN reports, a company that compiles baseball statistics on the internet for sports fans who can then pretend to run their own teams, is up against Major League Baseball, who say that these statistics are their “intellectual property”.

Major League Baseball has claimed that intellectual property law makes it illegal for fantasy league operators to “commercially exploit the identities and statistical profiles” of big league players.

Baseball being “pastime of an estimated 16 million people”, is is probably a good idea to exclude your “consumers” from doing anything with the data your “product” generates. It will hugely help baseball’s popularity (not that I care, since I know of no sport that is more boring to me, except maybe chess.)

But at issue is really something else:

CBC Distribution and Marketing wants the judge to stop Major League Baseball from requiring a license to use the statistics. The company says baseball statistics become historical facts as soon as the game is over, so it shouldn’t have to pay for the right to use them.

Strange thing that no licence is required so far to publish the results of the game.

Today’s weather is brought to you Copyright of Weather.com. Don’t forget to pay the licence fee if you start a business chat with a “Fine weather today, isn’t it?” as that would be commercial use.

Wired has an excellent essay on anonymity by security guru Bruce Schneier:

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need anonymity. It wouldn’t be necessary for commerce, since no one would ostracize or blackmail you based on what you purchased. It wouldn’t be necessary for internet activities, because no one would blackmail or arrest you based on who you corresponded with or what you read. It wouldn’t be necessary for AIDS patients, members of fringe political parties or people who call suicide hotlines. Yes, criminals use anonymity, just like they use everything else society has to offer. But the benefits of anonymity — extensively discussed in an excellent essay by Gary T. Marx — far outweigh the risks.

CCTV cameras are used for observation. The question is, what do they observe? In Merseyside, UK, three municipal workers have been convicted for using a surveillance camera to peep into a woman’s flat, The Register reports.

Judge Gerald Clifton told the triumvirate: “To dismiss what was happening as laddish behaviour – something that the 21st-century, apparently, condones – is absurd. You have only to read the impact statements of the lady to realise the harrowing effect this has had on her. Her life has almost been ruined, her self-confidence entirely destroyed by the thought that prying male eyes have entered her flat.”

This is not unusual at all – the peeping, that is. Two Austrian hackers in Vienna intercepted a CCTV camera’s signal. The footage showed that the operator’s attention was clearly diverted from preventing crime:

Wie zwei Vertreter des Datenschutzvereins Quintessenz auf dem 22. Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) in Berlin erklärten, schwenkten die Beamten bei einem der am Wiener Schwedenplatz aufgezeichneten Filme von einem Fenster der benachbarten Häuser zum nächsten und zoomten ganz dicht ran. Man hätte recht genau beobachten können, “was sich hinter den Gardinen abspielt”, so Martin Slunksy

For all the technology, it’s still people operating the gear. Law-and-Order-types tend to forget this.